Sunday, June 25, 2006

Three shapes, three heads video

A fun little experiment using three different shapes to draw three different heads.

What I ended up with, was a Superman whose chin would put Jay Leno's to shame, a version of Fat Albert if he had come straight outta Compton, 'Hey, hey, hey, I'm gonna bust a cap in yo' ass, fool!', and a woman looking appropriately concerned.

Adam- Unfortunately, since I live in Australia and currently have a young family, I won't be going to San Diego anytime soon (although San Diego is one of the first places in the States I want to visit. I hear they have a great zoo)

Cactus- I draw these in Photoshop. I originally tried using one of the free online sketch sites like 'Rate my Drawing' to make my videos, but they don't support tablet sensitivty, so you only get uniform linework. That, and they didn't record every line I made.

Hey Chris, love the videos. Have attempted this before but I had some issues with my screen-capture software. I illustrate on a Wacom in Illustrator and was using Camtasia for the screen-capturing... what do you use for capturing? Does your hard-drive constantly spin? Love your style.

I hear Camtasia's a great screen capturing tool, but unfortunately it's PC only. I'm on a Mac and the one I use is called SnapZ Pro. I'm on a G5 Dual processor so I don't get the constant spin, but I do notice a very slight slowing of Photoshop while I'm drawing, but not enough to create a problem.

Currently I use Photoshop CS which costs around $400-$500 US. But for years I made do with Photosop 5.5. Any version from 5 upwards (as this was when the invaluable 'history' feature was included) will be more than adequate.

I use a Wacom Intuos graphic tablet 6x8 inches. These days you can buy the latest version Intuos3 for about $280-$300 US. Wacom Graphire is a cheaper option, but it doesn't have the same pen sensitivity as the Intuos.

These days I mainly use Illustrator to vectorize bitmap art, using a third party plugin called Silhouette (similar to Adobe Streamline), which coverts bitmap art into vector, so they can be printed on large scales.